Daphne straightened.
He wanted to play?Let’s play. She’d faced worse, so much worse than this. Let him come to her class, in the gym where she’d been an instructor for years. And where five other instructors, who happened to be friends, could kick his ass into next week if needed. She taught the best self-defense classes around, but she wasn’t stupid. The first thing was getting away, which she could. But five burly guys who knew where to punch and kick to make it hurt were better than her lone ass. “Fine,” she said. “There’s a gym on Cedar and a coffee shop two doors down. Thursday at 7.”
He nodded. “I’ll be there.”
She gave him her best don’t-mess-with-me glare. “If you’re a minute late, I leave.”
“If I’m early, do I get extra credit?”
“No.”
He smiled like this was a game he’d already won.
And for the first time, she wasn’t sure he was the one being played.
~*~
The rest of the week passed with an eerie calm.
No nightmares, and that alone was a welcome deviation from the usual. Most nights, her dreams were warzones filled with burning books and her father’s voice echoing down corridors that didn’t exist.
For the past few nights, it had been nothing but sleep. She wasn’t foolish enough to call it peace, but it was a reprieve, and she’d take it.
Daphne worked. Sorted returns. Reshelved volumes. Corrected the library classification system with the fury of someone holding back a tsunami of overthinking. And she tried,reallytried, not to think about the looming meeting, but her dumbass mind looped back to him. Over and over.
Hunter.
There was something about him that made her skin crawl, but not in a red-flag way. It wasn’t danger, not a threat. Simply the intensity of someone who seemed to be made of tension and shadows and action. Which should’ve been enough to scare her off.
It would’ve been, if he were anyone else.
But no matter how much she circled it, she kept coming back to one maddening, contradictory truth: there was something in her that trusted him.
Not trusted him,trusted him. Please. She barely trusted her friends, and she’d known and tried them for years. The part of her that had seen real violence and survived didn’t brace when he got close. It didn’t flinch when he looked at her. A part that recognized, in a very deep and unwilling place, that he wasn’t dangerous.
Uncomfortable? Absolutely.
Invading every corner of her brain like a cocky, beautiful, absolutely fuckable plague? Check.
All of those reasons were more than enough to get rid of him.
But he was not a threat.
Which, of course, made everything worse.
Because if he wasn’t dangerous, then she had no reason to avoid the meeting–no way in every hell she’d call it a date. No reasonto feel this ridiculous surge of nerves every time she thought about seeing him.
And when Thursday rolled in, she was ready to strangle him for making her do enough mental gymnastics to win the freaking Olympic Games.
She told her friend Harper, who also happened to be the town deputy, about it. She’d talked about it to her gym buddies with enough sarcasm to keep it from sounding like anything important. Just coffee with some guy who might be a little unhinged and probably made up his job title.
Harper offered a background check.
The others agreed to stick around. “You’re not dying alone in a coffee shop,” Sean said flatly, cracking his knuckles like he hoped someone would give him a reason, not even a big one, to throw hands.
“Appreciate the vote of confidence,” Daphne muttered.
Sweet and firm, already texting the gym group chat with the time and place, Tom sighed. “You’re not dying at all.”
